The role of selective attention in emergency wayfinding: An eye tracking-integrated virtual reality experiment

Emergencies, such as fire and earthquake, highly jeopardize human safety in indoor environments. In emergencies, acute stress activated by the threat of hazards influences human wayfinding efficiency and safety. However, the underlying cognitive basis of the influence of acute stress on the wayfinding process remains unclear. To narrow this knowledge gap, we focused on the core cognitive process, namely selective attention during emergency wayfinding, and conducted a virtual reality (VR)-based wayfinding experiment with a within-subject design. Three stress level settings were designed to induce participants’ stress. For each trial, participants were required to finish the wayfinding task within five minutes, during which a VR version of the Eriksen flanker task (EFT) was set to evaluate selective attention with the eye tracking function embedded in the VR helmet. The result demonstrated the positive effect of stress on the information process speed in selective attention measured by response time and the wayfinding performance measured by net distance. In addition, we found that the response time in selective attention plays a mediation role in the relationship between stress in the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) and wayfinding performance. This study provides researchers with a new pathway to investigate the cognitive mechanism in emergency wayfinding with VR and eye tracking technologies. The findings are expected to advance the understanding of the underlying cognitive mechanism in emergency wayfinding, which has significant implications for developing evacuation simulation considering cognitive processes, as well as for evacuation planning of complex indoor environments and crowd evacuation management during indoor emergencies.